Project Overview:
Currently AfterGlow Cloud uses Graphviz as rendering backend for graphs. While we can adjust some settings to modify the output but it requires another submission of input file. Idea of the project is to make AfterGlow Cloud tool interactive and simplify process of resulting graph analysis by allowing:

selecting nodes

grouping and collapsing nodes

computing node and link size based on different criteria

allow dynamically change rendering algorithms

using helios.js to allow perform graph operations

According to discussion in the mailing list there will be four main steps:

Add support of JSON output to afterglow.pl. Output JSON will be suitable to be consumed by helios.js library.

Implement a “bridge” between helios.js and D3.js. Helios.js supports JSON as input data and can produce JSON description of graph as a result of it's operations. D3.js can consume JSON as input data. So the main problem here is create conversion between helios.js and D3.js JSON objects.

Add ability to interact with primitives generated by D3.js. It will allow selecting nodes and connections.

Update existing UI according to introduced changes.

Project plan

June 17 - June 23 – Adding helios.js to application and make it consume afterglow.pl output.

June 24 – June 30 – Implementation of data exchange between afterglow.pl and D3.js through helios.js. It will allow to visualize the results of all further development and see if we are moving into the right direction. Further GraphSON generation improvements.